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All and sundry can currently check out the early-mid game of WildStar, as Carbine’s MMORPG is still in open beta testing until early Monday morning, but what about the supposed real part of MMORPGs, the end-game–raiding? The lastest part of WildStar’s slow marketing reveal focuses on just that, detailing raiding with words and pictures and moving pictures. The word “hardcore” is muttered a lot during talk of dynamic battlefields, telegraphed attacks, randomised events, and hitting monsters until hats burst forth from their smashed guts.

These aren’t your father’s raids, is a line no one in video game marketing will have said in the past decade, though they are the same basic idea of grouping up with 20-40 people then smashing through big minibosses and giant bosses to find treasure. WildStar hopes to keep raiders on their toes somewhat with dynamic bits.

“On Nexus, enemies learn from your pesky visits,” so goes the official word. “Be prepared for tectonic shifts from one week to the next, with unique events and bosses available at variable times.” Levels might also shift and reconfigure, and certain attacks will destroy floors, though it isn’t entirely clear quite how sweeping these changes are.

It’ll be interesting to see how this is received. A large part of raiding culture is learning and nailing raids, with guilds and players trying to master raids so they can easily farm them for their precious items. But if raids stay fresh and interesting, perhaps people might play them for ~spit~ fun?

The official site has more on a few specific raids, and here’s the new ‘DevSpeak’ video:

You made a perfectly legit and acceptable point, but what would you say about that video?

Granted, i’m perfectly aware some people won’t enjoy the idea of going through boring stuff to get to the meat, it’s totally fine, but it’s still a little unfair to call the whole game “old stuff” when it’s actually aiming at doing something good for the old crowd.

The latter wants the return of good raiding and this is something WoW can’t muster, especially in it’s current state, effectively making Wildstar more or less the only good MMO for raiders. Other stuff might suck but if it’s because the majority of their focus is being put on such features, i can sort of understand. They can’t target everyone i guess.

If you want some other news from Wildstar, name reservation just took place last night. And it was a god-awful mess. Initially scheduled for 8 PM CEST, the system died so hard they decided to postpone it until 10 PM CEST. Well, the system died pretty much just as hard the second time around. And it’s still a bit wobbly this morning.

Can anyone tell me how much the raid content is affected by the Paths?
Are there different paths for Explorers? Support buildings for Settlers? Or is this a soldier-only endgame?

Yeah, I only got to play the first few levels yet and cannot gauge how powerful the Path system actually is. The videos and website make a big deal out of it, but on first glance it looked more on a level with crafting professions.

Paths are just modifiers of your day-to-day experience, mostly out in the field. If you’re a soldier you can expect more opportunities to fight wave of enemies and that sort of stuff, while an explorer might find hidden paths and so on.

They’re considered a big deal mostly because they tailor the experience a little more towards your tastes, and also because the Settler can do a lot of interesting stuff in the open world for everyone to enjoy.

It’s likely that raids will make good use of various paths, my speculation is that if you don’t have a scientist in your group you won’t be able to examine a certain thing that might spawn an optional boss, that sort of stuff, but one thing i know is that you are not locked out of any instance regardless of your path.

Nah, it’s far more prominent and varied enough, in any zone you’re gonna get a lot of stuff for your path.

It’s nothing revolutionary either and sometimes we’re back at clicking stuff, checklist style, it’s just a little thing going for Wildstar.

With that said, you’ll get a ton of extra game lore if for example you’re a scientist, you’ll fight a lot of extra stuff as a soldier, explore hidden routes and weird climbing spots as an explorer, and provide various commodities for everyone including rare quest givers and NPCs as a settler.

Long story short: it doesn’t make Wildstar an MMO revolution ( which is not trying to be ) but it has enough going for it that it’s surely a welcome feature.

Also, anything i’ve said needs to be examined with the proper mindset: Wildstar mostly wants to be a “better WoW”, not something like EQ:Next.

It’s a sign of how the MMO market has evolved that a new MMO actually has any RAID content at launch – it’s usually something “patched-in later” – I suppose this is a good sign they’ve looked ahead – but…

As nice as all that seems – I have a feeling that the requirements for raiding will be

Can you jump?
Can you circle strafe?
Can you lie about your experience and get lucky on the day??

I didn’t get Wildstar’s combat in the time I played it – it seemed a bit “weightless” to me. It certainly required skill.timing and that’s both unusual and welcome in an MMO but I didn’t really enjoy it and I guess by the time you get to this stuff you’ll have not been enjoying it for a while.

As for the specializations – all I saw of those were quests to gather shit of differing types. I’m sure there’s a point – I doubt it will matter much in something like this tho. I mean, would you want to exclude players from any encounter based on a casual choice they made months ago?

The system is nice and more fun than the standard mmo combat, but the realisation is far from perfect, the feedback feels lacking and hit detection can be off – ie you jump out of the attack zone but still get hit.

I messed around a bit in open beta and I actually liked it. I thought the combat was fun for what it was. The game itself seemed pretty polished and well put together. It seems to be a good MMO and I suspect I will end up buying it at some point. You know I played and loved vanilla WoW with no expectation of ever raiding or have the best gear. I just loved being a part of the world blizzard had created. This was before my mind was tainted by the “only thing that matters is endgame” mentality a lot of mmo players seem to have. I wish I could get that feeling back and with each new mmo I play I hope too. Let’s hope this one does cause I think its the closest thing to vanilla WoW we will ever get.

I tried out Wildstar. It really doesn’t break the mold as much as a lot of other games have since WoW became the new standard. They seem to be trying very hard to simply be ‘World of Warcraft but better’, which might satisfy some, but personally I’m not convinced and not really interested in another by-the-numbers game.

There’s still Firefall, Secret World, as well as a lot of big multiplayer RPGs like Payday 2 and Darksouls 2 that have much greater gameplay. Personally I had a lot more fun in the opening minutes and ensuing weeks in Warhammer Online than I did in my first few hours of Wildstar, and that was despite actually playing with a friend for the latter.

I’d more or less concur with that. I tried most of what was to offer in Closed Beta, and I mostly found myself just playing through to see if it got any better. It didn’t, at least not in my opinion, and I had absolutely no desire to return to it for OB. It worked up a whole lot of song and dance with the early trailers, which just made the dull, seen-it-all-before experience all the more disappointing.

I gave the beta a shot, but although the presentation was imaginative and the art was good my ‘meh’ on getting past the on-rails tutorial and into the open world could probably have been detected from Mars. For most of us grownups raiding is a jam tomorrow affair- it’s nice that they have a bit of endgame content at launch but do we really have to sink a couple of hundred hours doing same-old questing etc to get to something we haven’t seen before?

It`s kind of fresh with less predictable raids. It will surely be a hit with some, the question is whether it will work with the majority of players that are generally attracted to raids and end level content. It could be a risky move that in the worst case would alienate the intended target audience.

Personally I believe the way to expand interest in MMO games is doing what Ultima Online and Eve did/does, namely letting players get more ownership of game resources and processes. No content is cheaper for the developer than the content the player creates him/herself. It also strengthens the bonds with community – as proven by Valve through the years. Among upcoming MMOs only Everquest Next seems to be the only one having taken notice of this. Until they launch WoW still seems to be the most well developed MMO alternative – having the resources to adapt and change with the trends.

While I applaud lots of raiding in an MMORPG, I think 40 man is a terrible idea. It hasn’t been tried in a while and times have changed a lot since it was tried (and didn’t work so well). There is way more competition for players online time these days, players flit around more between games, and so on.

I would also applaud not giving in to the wider appeal/casual MMORPG trap but you can’t really say WildStar really does that.

40 man is a bad idea because raid content takes a lot of development time and so very few players will ever do it. You can’t really do 40 man well without having a highly dedicated guild that borders on (or is) a job or a paramilitary organization. I think there are going to be fewer players than ever before who can be in such a guild, or who want to be in such a guild, and that 40 man just won’t get done enough to justify its existence (as with WoW, the most popular and populated MMORPG, which immediately abandoned it after vanilla because creating content for an extreme minority is really dumb).

It doesn’t matter anyways since WildStar isn’t worth playing. No game that has built-in cheating (gold for cash via CREDD) is worth playing.

I think you are right. However – it depends on how it is designed. If it is designed like a continous jump-in, jump-out kind of affair that anyone can join into – with less dependency on having certain classes present, then it might work well in the kind of fast paced MMO that Wildstar seems to attempt at being/sell themselves as. More accessible like… say, a TF2 Map, and less like Everquest 1`s horrible, weekend-long Plane of Sky raids. The emphasis on randomizing raid content would fit with a design like that. I guess we`ll know what it plays like soon enough.

Personally I do feel like downloading the open beta just to test what the combat and controls feel like.

Totally similar gold buying systems exists in EvE Online and GW2, but we didn’t hear you complaining. Even in WoW, you can actually buy pets from the online store, cage some of them and sell them on AH.

Gold farmer and sellers are a pain in every online game. I think that allowing it and providing it by official systems is the best way to kill it.